Harry's Flat. 11 May 2000.
Harry didn't feel like a loser when, shortly before midnight, he unlocked the door to his flat and saw the red eye on the answerphone blinking. He had carried Oleg to bed and drunk tea, and Rakel had said that one day she would tell him a long story. When she wasn't so exhausted. Harry had answered that she needed a holiday, and she agreed.
'We could go together, all three of us,' he had said, 'when this business is over.'
She had stroked his hair.
'This is not the sort of thing to be flippant about, Harry Hole.’
‘Who's being flippant?'
'I can't talk about this now. Go on home, Harry Hole.'
They had kissed a little more in the hallway, and Harry still had the taste of her on his lips.
Without turning on the light, he crept into the sitting room in stockinged feet and pressed the play button of the answerphone. Sindre Fauke's voice filled the darkness:
'Fauke here. I've been thinking. If Daniel Gudeson is more than a ghost, there's only one person on this earth who can solve this riddle. And that's the man who was on watch that New Year's Eve when Daniel Gudeson was apparently shot dead: Gudbrand Johansen. You have to find Gudbrand Johansen, Inspector Hole.'
Then there was the sound of the receiver being replaced, a bleep, and where Harry expected the click, a new message instead.
'Halvorsen here. It's 11.30. I've just received a call from one of the officers outside Mosken's flat. They've been waiting and waiting, but he hasn't returned home. So they tried to ring the number in Drammen, just to see if he would answer the phone. But he didn't answer. One of the men drove to Bjerken, but everything was locked up and the lights were off. I asked them to stick it out for a while yet and put out a call for Mosken's car on police radio. Just so you know. See you tomorrow.'
New bleep. New message. New record on Harry's answerphone.
'Halvorsen again. I'm going senile. I completely forgot to mention the other thing. Looks as if we've finally had a bit of luck. The SS archive in Cologne didn't have any personal details about Gudeson or Johansen. They told me to ring the central Wehrmacht archive in Berlin. There I talked to a nice old grump who said that very few Norwegians had been in the regular German army. But when I explained the matter to him, he said he would check anyway. After a while he rang back and said that, as expected, he hadn't found anything about Daniel Gudeson. However, he had found copies of some papers concerning one Gudbrand Johansen, also a Norwegian. It appeared from the papers that he had been transferred from the Waffen SS to the Wehrmacht in 1944. A note was made on the copies that the original papers were sent to Oslo in the summer of 1944, which, according to our man in Berlin, could only mean that Johansen had been sent there. He also found some correspondence with a doctor who had signed Johansen's medical certificates. In Vienna.'
Harry sat down on the only chair in the room.
'The doctor's name was Christopher Brockhard, at the Rudolf II Hospital. I checked with the Viennese police and it turns out the hospital is still fully functional. They even gave me the name and telephone number of twenty- odd people who worked there during the war and are still alive.'
The Teutons know how to archive, Harry thought.
'So I began ringing round. I'm really crap at speaking German!'
Halvorsen's laughter crackled in the loudspeaker.
I rang eight of them before I found a nurse who could remember Gudbrand Johansen. She was an old lady of seventy-five. Remembered him very well, she said. You'll have the number and her address tomorrow morning. By the way, her name is Mayer. Helena Mayer.'
A crackly silence was followed by a bleep and the click of the tape recorder stopping.
Harry dreamed about Rakel, about her face burrowing into his neck, about her strong hands, and Tetris blocks falling and falling. But it was Sindre Fauke's voice that woke him in the middle of the night and made him stare at the contours of a figure in the dark.
'You have to find Gudbrand Johansen.'
84
Akershus Fortress. 12 May 2000.
It was 2.30 in the morning and the old man had parked his car beside a low warehouse in a street called Akershusstranda. Years ago the street had been a main thoroughfare in Oslo, but after the Fjellinje tunnel had been opened Akershusstranda had been closed off at one end and was only used during the day by those working in the docks. And prostitutes' clients who wanted a relatively undisturbed place for the 'walk'. Between the road and the water there were several warehouses and on the other side was the western side of Akershus Fortress. Naturally, if anyone had taken up a position in Aker Brygge with a quality riflescope they would certainly have been able to see the same as the old man did: the back of a grey coat which jerked every time the man inside it thrust his hips forward, and the face of a very made-up and very drunken woman who was being banged against the west wall of the fortress, right under the cannons. On each side of the mating couple was a floodlight projector lighting up the rock face and the wall above them.
Akershus, the WWII Wehrmacht prison. The internal section of the fortress area was closed for the night, and even though he could probably find his way in, the risk of being discovered in the actual place of execution was too great. No one really knew how many were shot there during the war, but there was a memorial plaque for fallen Norwegian Resistance men. The old man knew that at least one of them was a common criminal who had deserved his punishment whichever way you looked at it. And it was there they had shot Vidkun Quisling and the others who had been tried for war crimes and sentenced to death. Quisling had been imprisoned in the Powder Tower. The old man had often wondered if the Powder Tower had inspired Jens Bjorneboe's book, in which he described, in great detail, various methods of execution over the centuries. Was his description of execution by firing squad actually a portrait of the execution of Vidkun Quisling that October day in 1945 when they led the traitor out to the square to drill his body with bullets? Had they, as the author wrote, placed a hood over his head and fastened a white square of cloth over his heart as a marker? Had they given the command to shoot four times before the shots rang out? And had the trained marksmen shot so badly that the doctor with the stethoscope had been forced to say that the condemned man would have to be executed again-until they had done it four or five times and death occurred through loss of blood from the many surface wounds?
The old man had cut out the description from the book.
The grey coat had finished his business and was on his way down the slope to his car. The woman still stood by the wall; she had pulled her skirt back into place and lit a cigarette which glowed in the dark when she inhaled. The old man waited. Then she crushed the cigarette under her heel and began to walk down the muddy path round the fortress and back to her 'office' in the streets around Norges Bank.
The old man turned towards the back seat where the gagged woman stared at him with the same petrified eyes he had seen when she became conscious after being given diethyl ether. He could see her mouth moving behind the gag.
'Don't be frightened, Signe,' he said, leaning over and fastening something on to her coat. She tried to bend her head to see what it was, but he forced her head up.
'Let's go for a walk,' he said. As we used to.'
He got out of the car, opened the rear door, pulled her out and shoved her in front of him. She stumbled and fell on the gravel in the grass beside the path, but he caught hold of the rope which bound her hands behind her back and pulled her to her feet. He positioned her directly in front of one of the floodlight projectors, with the light in her eyes.
'Stand still. I forgot the wine,' he said. 'Red Ribeiros. You can remember it, can't you? Quite still, otherwise I…'
She was blinded by the light and he had to put the knife right in front of her face for her to see it. Despite the piercing light, the pupils were so large that her eyes seemed almost completely black. He went down to the car and scouted around. No one in sight. He listened and all he heard was the usual drone of the town. Then he opened the
